Many electronic circuits, in particular, any circuit that is coupled to a medium such as an antenna or cable may need some kind of protection against overvoltage events. Such overvoltage events may be induced by external sources such as external electromagnetic fields, high output-power transmitters on the same media, and/or lightning events, the effects of which may reach the electronic circuit through the medium coupled to the circuit. Internally induced overvoltage may result from system transients, in particular, during mode transitions such as power-up, power-down and other transitions, and/or temporary excessive gain setting of one or more programmable gain stages that can cause overvoltage at their output nodes or other nodes of the circuit.
Existing overvoltage protection circuits may use anti-parallel diodes that can cause non-linearity in the signal path and may not be able to sense the overvoltage at other nodes of the circuit other than the node that is protected. Further, the existing overvoltage protection schemes may be incapable of protection against internally-induced overvoltage events and may lack features such as status reporting and programmability for being activated prior to an overvoltage event or for resetting at desired times.